Lego Goes Back to the Basics: Building Blocks

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Slashdot recently covered Lego's plan to stop producing its Mindstorms line in response to the Danish company's worst financial loss in history. While the original article linked focused primarily on Lego's plans to cease production on various toy lines, Yahoo News now has a follow-up article that looks in greater detail at Lego's plan for the future. 'We are returning to Lego's former concept,' says Lego owner and president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. 'We're going to focus on building bricks as our main product, concentrating on little kids' eagerness to assemble.' Kristiansen goes on to blame the company's financial woes on its attempt to follow trends rather than focusing on its more traditional products. In turn, the company's plan for 2004 will include a renewed marketing push for Lego bricks as opposed to licensed products like the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. Toy researcher Joern Martin Steenhold also notes the following in the article: 'All research, including my own, shows that computer games and other electronic games take up only 20 to 30 percent of children's play time. Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I always preffered unabashed Lego sets.

Having 100 of each was great. The sets with instructions were fun, but it really was more enjoyable to be creative. That's what we should getting children to do anyways.

Re:First Post

[jedidiah]

Bullsh*t. Lego has to compete with all of it's little rivals that can now make perfectly compatable Lego knockoffs. Lego has always been the premium brand. It's little wonder that their sales would suffer during an economic slump when the dollar is weak. Blaming their current losses on current management is rather simpleminded.

They need to continue to differentiate themselves from a sea of knockoff artists that can clone any simplistic kit Lego makes.

I was actually looking forward to buying my son some of the more interesting modern Lego sets available these days. If they gut their line, I certainly won't be buying. There really wouldn't be a point.

Re:First Post

[whittrash]

At Christmas I went through Target and checked out the Lego selection. It was pathetic. The legos I really wanted to see were Iraq legos, with Saddam in a Spider hole, Hummers, tanks, 4th Infantry Division Bradley Fighting vehicles, a prison and barracks, that would be cool. There were no space legos, no pirate legos, no medieval legos, no modern day legos (helicopter, ambulance, race car etc.). All they had were stupid NBA, Harry Potter, Star Wars and some useless NASA rockets and a bunch of crap. I didn't even see the bucket of plain legos which is my favorite. I have never, ever bought legos which were of a branded product (like Harry Potter or NBA), that isn't the point of Legos (Although the NBA arena they sell would make a very good deathmatch arena for wily humans vs. the alien robots or humans infected with dinasaur DNA). Legos are only useful when you can build an asteroid base with a small army of space pirates (who have a black flagged pirate space ship complete with sails) and they wage war with the Space Patrol and space miner Bill and his dump truck crew over a mining facility which always gets destroyed in a massive conflagration and has to be rebuilt in a new configuration. You can't do that with a Shaq lego set, all the imagination is cut off. They don't sell any of the right parts for a time machine anymore. And how am I supposed to build a fusion generator with my niece and nephew that overloads blowing up half the planet with the gimpy legos they sell now. No wonder they are losing cash.

what I would like to see

[mpost4]

is a return to the way legos were sold in the 80's, not in sets, yes there were those, but you could also just get a generic set. I have not see a generic set in the stores around here, they all are some set based on some movie game or some thing, but no generic set.

Re:what I would like to see

[TopShelf]

The great thing about doing this (going back to generic set sales) for Lego is that it drastically reduces their costs while also directing focus back where it belongs - on the open-ended nature of the toy. Instead of directing a kid to build Hogwarts or something, let them build whatever their imagination comes up with...

Re:what I would like to see

[tuffy]

The great thing about doing this (going back to generic set sales) for Lego is that it drastically reduces their costs while also directing focus back where it belongs - on the open-ended nature of the toy. Instead of directing a kid to build Hogwarts or something, let them build whatever their imagination comes up with...

If the sets were built with generic pieces, a kid could build Hogwarts from the directions. Then, he could tear it down and build a bunch of completely different things that look nothing like the picture on the box. The first yellow castle set I got back in the late 70s was like this - packed with plenty of plain pieces and only a handful of specialized ones.

Then, as early as the mid-80s, Lego started using specialized "castle wall" pieces that weren't useful for anything other than assembling medieval-looking buildings. It was a downward trend, though I didn't realize it at the time.

Re:what I would like to see

[DenOfEarth]

I remember getting a lego grey castle set that I rather liked. The castle wall piece weren't too bad, as they simply acted as a window frame kind of piece that added a bit to the castle, yet they remained somewhat generic enough in that you could build a wall around it with generic lego brick pieces. The castle gates were also made with generic pieces too, if I remember correctly, so they were good.

I saw my cousin got a 'bionicle' lego set for christmas this year, and it was ridiculous. I don't think there were more than a hundred pieces, and no more than a handful of them could be connected to something other than the piece they were supposed to be connected to on the picture on the box. The special piece thing has definitely gone way too far (even though the last lego set I got: a pirate ship, looked pretty damn impressive when it was all put together).

Stupid LEGO pieces

[nuggz]

The problem with LEGO is the stupid pieces.
Grab a random $20 kit at a store, it's full of special pieces with no real use.
What happened to actual blocks? you get only a few if any in the average kit.

I was going to buy lego for some children, until I realized I would need a moderate fortune to give them a decent assortment of basic pieces.

Back to the basics? Good...

[John_Booty]

I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.

I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.

what about the girls?

[tuxette]

Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.'

What about girls? (And there's supposed to be ingrained gender equality in Denmark hmmmf!)

OK, the girls that play with Legos and stuff like that might get shunned by the the silly girls who play with dolls and maybe some parents want their little girls to wear frilly dresses and play with dolls and girlie stuff but 1) it was always more fun to play with the boys, and 2) who says you can't make a tea party set with lego blocks??

Finally

[Remlik]

This makes me very happy to hear. I'm 25 and my favorite lego series was the "Model Team" with the Semi trucks, jeeps, vans, helicopters and generally cool, LARGE fully functional models of real life vehicles.

I recently rebuilt my model team semi and it now rests proudly on my desk. Right now they have a very nice lego Shuttle in the stores for $50 bucks (same price as most of the model team models back in the day, and even today on ebay)that I've been trying to convince my wife we need...hehe

Its really disapointing to go to the store and see Soccer, Harry Potter, and Star Wars sets with little more than 20 pieces and some look alike action figures. Give the kids somthing that will take them a few hours to build and leave them enough blocks to construct something different if they should choose.

Just this weekend I noticed some new sets out called "design sets" that were of normal everyday objects (one was a pontoon plane) and each set is capable of being at least 3 different things. (I assume they have docs inside which show how to convert as well..at least the last technic model I bought did)

This is the lego I remember and love, and I think more parents would rather buy somthing that can be more than just a scene from SW or HP.

Re:What about us?

[dnahelix]

You're not grown, you're just OLD .

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[Tassach]

The great part about parenthood is that "having a life" means that you spend time with the kids. Having kids means that you can go out and blow a wad of money on toys and not feel guilty about it. My munchkin is still a little young for lego, but when he's a little older you can bet that he & I are going to be spending many hours playing legos together.

Re:Great news for parents and children

[palutke]

A corporation moving back toward imagination and away from limiting corporate tie-ins, don't see too much flowing in that direction these days.

I wonder how much of their decision is based on the licensing fees that Lucas, etc. were charging. I can easily see them saying "Your license isn't bringing enough sales to justify the money you want for it. Thanks, but no thanks.

Lego's importance cannot be overstated.

[smackdotcom]

Lego was by far my favourite toy growing up. Indeed, I played with the stuff so much that I am convinced that it has affected my thinking patterns, and in good ways. My visual-spatial sense is excellent, and my mind is forever trying to break down problems into modular pieces; or, seeing a collection of modular components, trying to figure out intriguing ways to assemble them into a larger system. In short, ladies and gentlemen, I think in Lego.

That said, I hope that the Lego company goes about this the right way. The things I always wanted as a youngster were more hinges and other such articulated pieces in order to build things like spacecraft and vehicles with moving parts; doors and hatches that open, sensors that swivel, and so forth. Lego's strengths were always in the design of clever models that most of us would build at least once. You could learn some neat tricks by understanding how the model designers accomplished a particular effect using a small number of bricks. I agree with posters to a previous Lego story who criticized the overabundance of specialized pieces (anathema to the creative Lego builder) and the rather exorbitant prices of Lego kits.

Perhaps Lego has decided that its future is no longer in robotics, but computers can play a role in its revival. Embrace the Internet! As so many slashdotters will attest, there are large numbers of people for whom Lego remains a unique creative outlet. Work to bring them together through the Net, and offer to sell them what they want through that same channel. More standardized, well-thought-out basic bricks, offered with the promise of volume discounts through Internet purchases. Parents who still enjoy Lego and can get access to their favourite toy in bulk and share their love of creating with a community of fellow builders will have kids who will get an early taste of the joys of building with little plastic blocks, and will thus pass on the hobby to the next generation.

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[ShadyG]

Don't know how young your munchkin is, but my 2yo daughter is currently helping me build the meter-long Death Star. I pick out one example of a piece of which I need 34 and tell her to find 33 more of them. She really digs it. It helps with her fine motor skills (handling the small pieces), fine shape distinctions (1x1 plate with a loop at the end is different from a 1x1 plate without), and counting. And when we finish a page of building, she cheers.

It may take 10x as long as doing it myself, but who cares? That just means more time playing with Legos!

What about girls?

[Phronesis]

Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.

I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.

Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.

Lower prices

[Sandman1971]

What Lego needs to do is lower their prices. Their prices are just ludicrous! 80-120$ Can for a box of Legos? Lower the price to 20-30$ and people will buy.